‘Louisa Catherine,’ by Margery M. Heffron

By VIRGINIA DeJOHN ANDERSON

May 2, 2014

All she did was dab a little rouge on her cheeks to disguise her wan complexion and provide a rosy contrast to the black gown she would wear. But her husband strongly disapproved. Grabbing a towel, he pulled her onto his knee and wiped her face clean. It did not matter to John Quincy Adams that Queen Louise of Prussia had given his wife the cosmetic and expected it to be used.

Forty years later, Louisa Catherine Adams recorded her humiliation in a fragment of a memoir she called “Adventures of a Nobody.” That self-deprecating title, as Margery M. Heffron shows in her sparkling biography “Louisa Catherine,” belied the facts of Adams’s remarkable life. She was born in London in 1775 to Joshua Johnson, an Annapolis merchant, and the teenage Catherine Young Nuth — they would not actually marry for another decade. When the outbreak of the Revolution made their continued residence in England awkward, the family relocated to Nantes in France, where they socialized with other expatriate Americans. Among the Johnsons’ visitors in 1779 were John Adams and his 11-year-old son.

Four-year-old Louisa was not there to meet them. She was already ensconced in a convent-run boarding school confined to the top floors of the spacious mansion where the Johnsons’ apartment was located. Her education was completed in England after the family returned in 1783. Louisa was exposed to more rigorous academic training than was usual for girls at the time, but she also cultivated the social graces deemed far more useful than intellect in attracting a husband. As her life progressed, both brains and refinement would be put to the test.

In 1795, John Quincy Adams, now America’s minister to Holland, visited the Johnsons’ London home and his courtship of Louisa commenced. Its troubled progress presaged the difficulties that would intermittently plague their long marriage. It did not help that their parents initially objected to the match. Joshua Johnson, according to Louisa, “always had a prejudice towards the Yankees and insisted that they never made good husbands.” John and Abigail Adams, in turn, warned their son that Louisa would surely surrender to the dissipations of European court life and drive him into debt. John Quincy did not make matters any easier for the relationship when he supplied his fiancée with a reading list and course of study, urging her to improve her mind before their wedding.

The young couple stubbornly persevered, yet even after they married in the summer of 1797, they struggled with complications of their own making. Both harbored deep insecurities. John Quincy constantly worried about fulfilling his parents’ high expectations. Louisa agonized over her financially reckless father’s inability to provide the dowry he promised; she was certain the Adamses thought she had duped their son into marriage. Each was quick to take offense at a stray comment or prolonged silence, and found it much easier to express affection in writing rather than in person. They tried to abide by prevailing notions of gender inequality, with John Quincy asserting self-righteous dominion over his not-always-submissive spouse, but they were every bit as evenly matched in intellect and willpower as his formidable parents.

Any marriage would have been strained by the trials, both private and public, that John Quincy and Louisa endured. Frequent illness and repeated miscarriages sapped her physical and emotional energies. For years, he wavered between the foreign service and domestic politics as he sought an outlet for his considerable ambitions. His diplomatic and political career carried them back and forth across the Atlantic and often entailed prolonged separation from their children. At his various postings across Europe, they tried to mingle in society as best they could on the paltry salary provided by the American government.

If Louisa managed with less fashionable clothing and paler cheeks than she really wanted, she made up for such deficiencies with substantial charm. She easily formed friendships with queens and aristocrats, in contrast to the decidedly unsociable behavior of her husband, who preferred long, solitary walks to the glitter and gossip of European court life. And despite her frailty, Louisa could be tough when circumstances demanded. Only a woman of uncommon courage would have undertaken a 2,000-mile expedition from St. Petersburg to Paris, through lands devastated by the Napoleonic wars, to rejoin a husband who gave little thought to what dangers might attend such an epic journey. And only a sharply intelligent woman would later have produced an extraordinary narrative of her perilous adventure.

Returning to the United States in 1817 to take up an appointment as secretary of state, John Quincy immediately set his sights on the presidency. Louisa was preoccupied by her reunion with two sons who had been left in their grandparents’ care during the Adamses’ Russian sojourn. Reacquainting them with the younger brother who accompanied his parents to St. Petersburg, Louisa found herself serving as mediator between her moody children and their imperious father. Yet even as she attended to family matters, she could not avoid being swept up in the maelstrom of Washington ­politics.

Louisa became her husband’s fiercest advocate. Like other Washington wives, she knew that the game of politics was played at social gatherings as well as in Congress, and though she often scoffed at complicated rules of etiquette that sought to establish a rigid social hierarchy in an increasingly democratic society, she followed them nonetheless. Once again, now in Washington parlors and ballrooms instead of European mansions, she employed her notable charm to smooth her husband’s rough edges.

In private, Louisa sharpened her pen to record shrewd observations on politics and personalities in the nation’s capital. Her powers of expression were finely honed after years of letter writing to her sons, to her husband during their frequent separations and — especially — to her in-laws. John and Abigail Adams’s initial skepticism about Louisa dissipated as they came to appreciate her devotion to John Quincy. They particularly relished her “journal-letters” — accounts of speeches attended, parties given, gossip overheard — typically composed with mischievous wit. After Abigail’s death in 1818, John anxiously awaited these entertaining missives, each of which he deemed a “reviving cordial.” No longer intimidated by the gruff old man, Louisa freely inserted her own political views and sly character sketches of Washington notables.

In a rare political misjudgment, Louisa formed a “most favorable impression” of Andrew Jackson, even organizing a ball in his honor in January 1824. The contest for that year’s election had reached fever pitch, and John Quincy hoped to harness Jackson’s popularity to his own campaign, perhaps recruiting him as a running mate. When no candidate won an Electoral College majority, the House of Representatives selected Adams, allegedly because of a “corrupt bargain” in which he offered to make Henry Clay secretary of state in return for his support. Jackson, so recently feted at the Adamses’ house, became the new president’s bitterest political enemy.

This biography concludes abruptly with Adams’s 1825 inauguration, 27 years before Louisa’s death. It thus ends prematurely, but so too did the life of its author. Heffron, an independent scholar, succumbed to cancer before finishing a project that engaged her imagination for more than 30 years. Readers will nonetheless be grateful for this fascinating, if partial, portrait of an exceptional woman, and regret that its talented author fell ­silent too soon.

LOUISA CATHERINE

The Other Mrs. Adams

By Margery M. Heffron

Illustrated. 416 pp. Yale University Press. $40.

Virginia DeJohn Anderson teaches at the University of Colorado and is working on a new book, “The Martyr and the Traitor: Moses Dunbar, Nathan Hale, and the Tragedy of the American Revolution.”